I have never let schooling interfere with my education.
— Mark Twain
In 1962, the population of Lauderdale, Minnesota was about 1,800 residents — approximately the same size of the Town of Pagosa Springs in 2016. That year, 1962, a young man named Wayne Jennings became the president of the Lauderdale PTA. Mr. Jennings had just completed his Masters degree at the University of Minnesota a year earlier in the field of “curriculum and instruction” — and from what I can tell, he’d already developed an interest in the curious disconnect between “teaching” and “learning.”
Ten years later, Wayne Jennings had taken a job as principal at St. Paul Open School in St. Paul, Minnesota — just as the proponents of “Open Schooling” were beginning a decade of exploration into a somewhat radical approach to public education.
I would probably have had little interest in Mr. Jennings and his “open school” experiences in Minnesota, except for the fact that my daughter, Ursala Hudson, and a group of young Archuleta County moms began — 18 months ago — discussing the idea of opening a parent-designed charter school here in Pagosa Springs. The name of the school, as it prepares to open its doors in an as-yet-undefined location in Archuleta County, will be ‘Pagosa Peak Open School.’
The connection between a thoughtful Minnesota educator named Wayne Jennings, and a group of ambitious young moms in Pagosa Springs, began to unfold last February, when Ursala attended the annual Colorado League of Charter Schools conference in Denver and met Pamela Meade, the President and Chief Operating Officer of a St. Paul, Minnesota ‘school services’ company called Designs for Learning.
Ms. Meade was currently living in Arizona, with plans to move her family to Pagosa Springs within the next few years. She was enchanted with the idea that a volunteer group of parents would be creating a charter school in her future hometown, and she told Ursala that Designs for Learning would be delighted to assist the Pagosa Charter School Initiative with the writing of its 200-page charter school application — at a very reasonable cost. Like, free.
Pamela provided Ursala with several copies of a large-format paperback book with the intriguing title: Joining Hands: A Resourcebook on Integrating Experiential Learning into the School Curriculum. The book had been written in 1996 by a team of educators led by Wayne Jennings.
The book begins:
Parents, educators, students, business and community leaders, politicians — it seems everyone is complaining that schools are no longer relevant to the changing needs and increasing diversity of our society. Indeed, for too many children and youth, the community and the school are two unrelated worlds…
Twenty years later, the Pagosa Charter School Initiative board had completed a series of 17 visits to innovative public and private schools in Colorado and New Mexico, and had come to conclusions that aligned rather well with the educational model Wayne Jennings and his colleagues had been developing in Minnesota over the past several decades with a special focus on helping “at risk” youth. The “Joining Hands” book had been written in collaboration with several Native American educators, as part of an effort to bring “Experiential Learning” into tribal schools in Minnesota and Wisconsin. The publisher of the 1996 book was a new company that Wayne Jennings had formed with his colleague David Alley, who now serves as CEO for Designs for Learning, Inc.
I had a chance to interview David Alley and Pamela Meade last month via telephone, and I noted that, back in 1996, Designs for Learning was apparently focused on transforming school curriculum and practice — based on Wayne Jennings’ educational theories. But a visit to the Designs for Learning website, in 2016, suggested that the company was now focused on a menu of rather specialized services provided to charter schools.
Financial. Human Resources. Technology Support. E-Rate Services. Special Education. Program Support.
Mr. Alley gave a bit of historical background on the company’s 25-year history:
“We were fortunate to get a $5 million grant, back in the days of the first George Bush administration, as part of an initiative to create “break the mold” American schools. There was a lot of competition for these grants, and 11 teams were selected. Wayne was the gifted writer on our team. And these were the early days when the charter schools were first being created — the laws were just being passed here in Minnesota.”
Yes, a lot of competition. 686 educator teams had applied for the “break the mold” grants, and Designs for Learning was one of the 11 teams finally chosen, to create a new version of the public school called a “Community Learning Center.”
From a 1992 article in the LA Times:
The announcement by the 1-year-old New American Schools Development Corp. signaled an important test for the [Bush] Administration’s controversial theory that widespread reform can be achieved by privately financing the development of a small group of radically different, experimental schools that can be copied by districts and communities across the nation.
“Together they have given us the set of blueprints we will need for reinventing America’s schools for the next generation,” Ann D. McLaughlin, the corporation’s president and chief executive officer, said of the design teams, whose selection was announced at a news conference in Washington…
The “Community Learning Center” model directs more of its resources into technology and student-directed projects, and less into traditional staffing costs. Rather than viewing students as “consumers of pre-packaged knowledge,” the Community Learning Center model sees a child playing a different role: as the chief designer of his or her own learning — and as responsible for his or her own future. Students are expected to be creative participants in the school, and in the larger community — to be active contributors, rather than passive consumers.
According to the theories developed by Wayne Jennings and his colleagues over the past several decades, children and youth — when given this type of responsibility — require less “classroom management” because the students are themselves partly responsible for that management. The students better retain what they learn. Healthy character development naturally takes place.
That’s the theory, at least.
Then we have the practical challenges, imposed by the education bureaucracy. And those challenges are not insignificant.
There’s where the Pagosa Charter School Initiative might benefit most from a close relationship with a Minnesota-based company called Designs for Learning, Inc…
… soon to be also Colorado-based?